Is your phone listening in? Your stories

Facebook has always denied using smartphone microphones to gather audio from people's real-life conversations and then use that data to serve advertising. Last week Facebook's vice-president of ads, Rob Goldman, said on Twitter that the technology giant did not and had never carried out the practice. "And even two weeks ago my fiancee and I went to a friend's and drank a certain kind of liquor neither of us had ever bought or talked about on the phone, and the next morning it was the first ad Facebook showed her." "The following morning after the conversation with my wife about the product, my Facebook opened with an ad from Amazon with the Bug-a-salt fly killer gun listed as 'things you may be interested in'." "We were talking about the possibility of a Six Flags theme park being opened in Egypt, and on my Facebook that night were ads for Six Flags."